Get “Google Now” feature of Jelly Bean on Rooted ICS Android Phone

Google Now is happened to be the best thing that you could get in jelly bean 4.1 phones. It’s like your own personal secretary that stays with you throughout, unlike any other feature of ICS. But not anymore because now, your ICS phone could also get Google Now without its voice search feature, provided your phone is running ASOP ICS ROM else it won’t work.

 

Though without the voice search feature Google Now would be half as good as the one in jelly bean but still its worth having in your ICS as it will be enriched with a lot of other good stuff that comes along Google Now. However to get it in your ICS, follow the steps;

• Download the APK
• Open root explorer or other root enabled file explorer and go to / system
• Tap the “Mount R/W” button, then scroll down to build.prop and press and hold on it. Tap “Open in Text Editor”
• Find the line that says ro.build.version.sdk=15 and change it to readro.build.version.sdk=16. Press the menu button and tap “Save and Exit”
• Goto /system/app and hold-press GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk. Rename it toGoogleQuickSearchBox.apk1. If that file doesn’t exist just skip this step
• Reboot your phone and install the Google Now APK
• Go back and edit build.prop as described in step two, and change thero.build.version.sdk line back to 15
• Reboot your phone one last time and you are done!!

For more guidance you can follow the link http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1749045.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC2 Is Available for Download

The Document Foundation has announced last evening, July 20th, that the second Release Candidate version of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.6 office suite is available for download and testing.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC2 is here to fix exactly 25 bugs found in the previous Release Candidate version. A detailed changelog can be found here.

The development cycle of LibreOffice 3.6.0 will continue with one more Release Candidate version, which will be available for testing by the end of this month.

The stable release of LibreOffice 3.6 will see the light of day on the first week of August 2012.


Download LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC2

Install Linux Kernel 3.4.6 On Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13

Another maintenance release for Linux 3.4 has been made available recently. We have previously seen the release of Linux 3.4.5 (three days ago), but this kernel brings minor improvements and updates drivers. You can see the release notes for Linux 3.4.6 here.

Linux Kernel 3.4.6 Installation

To install Linux Kernel 3.4.6, you can install Debian packages for your appropriate architecture from this page, or make an automatic installation via our bash script for both Ubuntu 12.04 or Linux Mint 13 as follows:

 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-kernel-3.4.6 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47950494/upubuntu.com/linux-kernel-3.4.6

chmod +x linux-kernel-3.4.6 && sudo sh linux-kernel-3.4.6

When the installation is complete, reboot your system. Next, make sure Linux Kernel 3.4.6 is installed correctly with this command:

 uname -r

To remove this kernel and restore the previous one, run this command:

 sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.4.6-030406-generic

Good luck!

Serious Sam 3 Now Runs on Linux

Croteam, the Croatian-based game development studio behind the Serious Sam series, proudly posted a couple of days ago, July 18th, on their Facebook page, a screenshot of Serious Sam 3 running on Ubuntu Linux distribution.

There are no other details, besides the screenshot (click it above to enlarge) posted on Facebook by Croteam. Apparently the game was ported to the Linux platform and tested on the Ubuntu operating system.

Released eight months ago, on November 22nd 2011, the third iteration in the Serious Sam series, Serious Sam 3: BFE (Before First Encounter), is a first-person shooter (FPS) video game developed by Croteam and published by Devolver Digital. It is the prequel to Serious Sam: The First Encounter.

Looks to me like more and more developers bring their games to users of the open source Linux platform. We'll wait now for the release of Valve's Steam client, in fall 2012, and we will inform you want Serious Sam 3 is available for purchase on the Linux platform.

FreeNAS 8.2.0

After four beta versions and one release candidate, FreeNAS 8.2.0 is available for download, which is a free, open-source, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system based on FreeBSD. From the release announcement: "The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE. FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE is the first release on new branch of code that incorporates tighter integration between the ZFS command line and the FreeNAS GUI. This release also features the ability to run arbitrary services and interact with them through the FreeNAS GUI in a FreeBSD jail. This jail allows a wide range of third party software to be run on top of FreeNAS, using the PBI format from PC-BSD or FreeBSD packages or ports, as well as official FreeNAS plugins. Additional features include: support for iSCSI target reload; GUI support for SAS and FC multipath hardware; WebShell accessible from the FreeNAS web interface; ZFS scrubs are configurable from the GUI; a newer web toolkit is used in the GUI, enabling use of mobile browsers; an autotuning script tunes ZFS for the hardware it's running on." Read the press release, the release notes, and an important update to 8.2.0-RELEASE-p1. Download: FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x86.iso (96MB, SHA256), FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64.iso (104MB, SHA256).